Complete List of 145 SSD Makers

Making a solid-state disk drive is much easier than manufacturing a magnetic hard disk drive. Mainly, you just have to buy flash chips and assemble them with a controller from your own design or acquired from an outside company .

It's not a lot of investment and that's why many small Asian firms entered into this activity. The key differentiators are not the chips, available from several sources and evolving in parallel, always smaller an smaller. The main component is the controller, each one using different algorithms to manage the complex way of reading and above all writing flash chips.

Manufacturing HDDs needs much more investment, in hundreds of millions of dollars (clean rooms, robotics, lot of employees, etc.). At a time there was hundred of them. Now they are only three (Seagate, Toshiba, WD/HGST). Nobody is going to enter in this activity because the price is too high, the future of the market is not guaranteed, and all the patents are in the hands of current manufacturers.